Venice

The maritime republic where Christine de Pizan was born in 1364, four years before her family relocated to the French royal court, a birthplace she left as a small child but that gave her an Italian outsider's eye on the French intellectual world she later reshaped.

Venice was at the height of its trading power when Christine was born there in 1364, and her father was a physician and astrologer with a reputation good enough to be poached by the French king. The family left when she was four. She grew up at court in Paris, married at fifteen, and was widowed at twenty-five with three children and a mother to support, at which point she began writing for money and became, as far as anyone can establish, the first woman in Europe to live by it.